Dade County is up to two COVID-19 cases today on the Georgia Department of Public Health daily status report from the one case it's had since March 30--the patient who died last Friday--but there may be some ambiguity about the geography, said County Executive Ted Rumley at today's livestreamed county briefing.
"They won't tell us where that particular person lives in the county," said Rumley. "It could have been a miscount."
Walker County, next door to Dade, was listed as having four cases Tuesday but today is listed with only three, he pointed out, leading county officials both sides of the county line to suspect Walker's loss is Dade's gain. The county line atop Lookout can seem fairly eccentric, and some addresses on Lookout Mountain in Walker County are these days listed by the post office as "Rising Fawn," a name which is usually associated with Dade.
Rumley says he's consulted Shannon Whitfield, his counterpart in Walker, about the matter and Whitfield doesn't know either. "I don't know that he will know," said Rumley. And neither may the general public due to medical privacy laws that protect the identity and location of the patient.
Otherwise, the numbers in Georgia continue to be bad--9901 cases today from 8808 Tuesday, 362 deaths up from 329--but in Dade's immediate neighborhood not so bad, with DeKalb and Jackson in Alabama staying the same and the nearer Georgia counties also staying the same with their three or four cases each. "Try to keep your mindset like it is," said Rumley. It's hard staying home, he said, but it does seem to be working.
[Click the DPH logo to go directly to the daily Georgia status report.]
Rumley said he'd had no word about Dade's plea to Gov. Kemp to shut down Cloudland Canyon for the rest of the month, and neither had the other Georgia counties who want their own resident state parks shuttered during the lockdown. Gov. Kemp spoke a bit after Rumley wound up, at 4 p.m. Kemp extended the statewide shelter-in-place rule until the end of the month and addressed Georgians' concerns about being a tourist mecca during this crisis by shutting down vacation rentals--but he made a specific exemption for campgrounds and didn't say a word about state parks.
Otherwise, the county boss didn't have much to say today. He mentioned roadwork is going forward, with the county road crew having no difficulty staying six feet away from each other. He made another plea for poll workers--call the Dade Board of Elections at (706) 657-817 if interested. And he said he'd scheduled a meeting with Trenton's Southeast Lineman Training Center, which he said is considering not bringing in its next class of trainees until late May.
Rumley gave his cellphone number out as he does every day and The Planet will repeat it here for once: (423) 667-8999
Mayor Alex Case, who is also the county's emergency services director, said that though City Hall personnel are working from home, the city is still open, with police, sewer and public works staff all doing their jobs--call (706) 657-4167 if you have a problem with garbage or brush pickup.
He said his 911 department will be monitoring the weather tonight and in the morning. High winds are possible and so are pop-up tornadoes.
Sheriff Ray Cross reported that three more arrests have now been made for violations of the shelter-in-place order." The Planet continues to request arrest reports in those cases.
These briefings are livestreamed every day at 3 p.m. from the Dade County Ga. Facebook page. "Like" the page and you will be notified when it goes live. If you miss it, you can still see the video on the county page, or The Dade Planet also shares it on its own FB page.
